Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

11.21.2011

"Ms.45": A psychotronic reassessment

Abel Ferrara’s Ms.45 (1981) is a superlative psychotronic film—a tangle
of contradictions.It’s an
exploitation movie, a feminist revenge fantasy, a sleazy thriller, a stylishly
gritty independent film, a thoughtful exploration of female victimization the
likes of which would never pass in a mainstream Hollywood feature.I was much too young to appreciate it
when I saw it for the first time sixteen years ago; I hadn’t yet become attuned
to the way that such films could mix intelligence, shock value, and a kind of low-budget
aesthetic flair.

It’s even possible to read
Ms.45 as a movie about the importance of taking independent, low-budget,
or exploitation film seriously—a film that essentially puts itself in the
position of its heroine, Thana (played by the spellbinding Zoe Lund, in a
cult-icon-making performance).A
vulnerable, attractive, mute woman who works in the garment district in New
York, Thana is—along with virtually every other woman in the film—subject to constant,
unwelcome attention from men, which runs the spectrum from wolf-whistling and
pick-up attempts to workplace come-ons and rape at gunpoint.Women, the film argues, are assumed to
be endlessly available to men, who have no qualms about heckling them,
following them, touching them, making jokes about them, pushing them around,
and finally assaulting them.After
being raped, however, Thana begins to fight back: she murders her attacker,
then goes on a killing spree that recalls Travis Bickle’s fantasies in Taxi
Driver (1976) of using his gun to “wash
all the scum off the streets,” shooting pimps, pick-up artists, and any other
men who look at her in the wrong way.(A scene in which Thana points her gun at her own reflection in a mirror
also recalls Taxi Driver; other
scenes call to mind Repulsion
and Carrie.It’s in a rich tradition of films about
victimization, revenge, and psychosis.)

Thana, in other words, is
no longer someone to fuck with.Dressed provocatively in leather, her lips flaming red, she turns men on,
then turns her gun on them.Like
Thana, Ms.45 is angry,
aggressive, and shockingly deceptive.It looks like a movie that’s going to get us off—yet another
exploitation movie in which a woman is fucked at the expense of men’s spectatorial
pleasure—but then it turns its gun on us.It is, like Thana, in disguise, a vitriolic feminist movie dressed up as
exploitative fare.Or perhaps it’s
something even more complicated: an exploitation film as a feminist film, in which Ferrara proves that the
two are not mutually exclusive. To
assume that a low-budget film is simply cheap entertainment to be used and
discarded by an audience looking for titillation is to be guilty of the same
crimes as Thana’s male victims, and thus to make oneself vulnerable to the same
rude awakening.If exploitation
movies are so often treated like the women in Ms.45, as disposable entertainment, then Ms.45 is the Thana of exploitation movies: something not
to be fucked with.Original
rating: *** New rating: ****